SubscribeThis page will house information concerning all of my accepted publications and conference presentations. For information about works in progress or under submission, please visit the Research main page [ Link ] or Research in Progress page [ Link ]. The entries on this page are in reverse chronological order, with the most recent acceptances listed first.
JTWC - Writing Degree Binary :|: CCCC - Blogging Composition
SSCA - Political Parody Online :|: CCCC - Writer as Remixer
Writing Degree Binary: An Argument for Interscription
Accepted for publication by the Journal of Technical Writing & Communication, 2009
After several rewrites and a faulty submission or two, "Writing Degree Binary" was accepted for publication in early January, 2009, by the Journal of Technical Writing & Communication.
Abstract: Networked electronic text — fragmentary, mutable, connected, and instantly accessible from any computer or handheld device — challenges traditional notions of textual coherence and composition, offering affordances far beyond those possible in traditional, print-based texts, including those made available electronically. Such texts become tools, passively awaiting a user who activates, assimilates, and adapts their contents to his or her particular situation. This paper explores the creators' role in such texts, roles that remain underappreciated, unstudied, and misunderstood as a new, and necessary, form of composition activity. Their work is not considered authorship in most traditional senses of composition; although it involves a number of traditional authorial tasks: the decision to connect certain fragments to others, to add affordances beyond those allowed by print, creates the potential for structural coherence and viability of a networked text, potential then realized by users, who themselves become authors of this continually changing text.
Public Affairs Blogging as Social Action — with Carolyn R. Miller
Roundtable Co-leader at the 2008 Conference on College Composition & Communication in New Orleans, LA. My section was a discussion of political blogging, with a focus on the evolution of the form from single user journal to multi-user interactive website. The roundtable focused on the various uses, forms, and constraints of blogging in a rhetorical sense, with the title suggesting a unified genre (although this is, itself, representative of a common misunderstanding of what a "blog" is, one that conflates medium with genre).
A copy of my handout is available for download [ Link ].
Approaching the Visual Rhetoric of Political Parody
Presented at the 2007 Southern States Communication Association Convention in Louisville, KY, as part of a panel featuring papers from a doctoral seminar on Rhetoric & Digital Media.
Abstract: Among the more frequently and recently politicized elements in American society are the rights interpreted as guaranteed by the free-speech provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The arrival of the Internet introduced a cultural contact zone that complicated existing libel and copyright laws that had remained largely unchanged in Anglo-American culture since the Victorian Era. Although the lexicon of free-speech rhetoric has changed radically, and the issues attending thereto have been somewhat complicated by the introduction of new technologies, the exercise of free-speech by private citizens and the press has always been subject to scrutiny because the laws surrounding those rights are inherently vague and subject — as only text is — to interpretation and adjudication. The majority of free-speech cases concerned with the Internet involve parody sites; which are uniquely effective on the World Wide Web because basic principles of web design and digital production make it easy to appropriate visual and discursive elements for parodic imitation. Political parody sites in particular draw frequent fire as slanderous, libelous, or defamatory: copyright infringement is often at issue because the nature of digital image manipulation makes it easy to replicate, with slight — even miniscule — modifications, a logo or registered trademark. The visual rhetoric of parody is — for perhaps the first time — under scrutiny as public figures scramble to define what may — or may not — constitute parody on the web. This paper outlines a method by which we can analyze the visual rhetoric of parody as an equal contributor to the overall effect of digitally based political discourse.
A copy of my handout is available for download [ Link ].
Identifying the Writer as Re-mixer: Rearticulating "Writing" in New Media
Presented at the 2007 Conference on College Composition & Communication in New York, NY, as part of a panel. This was the first public forum for my article, "Writing Degree Binary," and was presented as part of a panel featuring my professor (for whom I wrote the original seminar paper) and a graduate school colleague of his.
Panel Proposal
1 sentence: Closely examines the changed nature of texts in new media and their effect on writing processes and the roles of writers.
Overview: This panel examines the changed nature of texts in new media and their effect on writing processes and the roles of writers. Digital texts are increasingly ubiquitous, widely distributed, and intricately cross-linked. Content can be functionally modularlized and remixed into new arrangements. For example, a digital news article can be divided into component parts (title, lead, body) and distributed to a website, PDA, or cell phone. Furthermore, these modular texts are often linked to more information (the full news item or related stories). To get the "full story," readers must often aggregate several texts of this kind, sometimes across different media. As teachers of literacy practices, we must better understand the changed nature of digital texts in order to better prepare students for their roles as workers, consumers, and citizens in the information age.
Modular texts and remixable content challenge us to rethink basic assumptions about how we use and compose texts. Ultimately, modular and remixable texts bring into question the identity of the writer as the principal architect of meaning in a given text. To take seriously the cumulative impact of information technology on writing practice, we map out relevant conceptual concerns. We address changing perceptions about the function of text and the nature of "textuality," the impact of modularity and remix on writing practices, and on the identity of the "writer."
A copy of our full proposal is available for download [ Link ].
A copy of the convention participant announcement is available for download as well [ Link ].
